Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!olivea!uunet!cbmvax!daveh
From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: A new Amiga needed...and soon!
Message-ID: <22765@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Date: 28 Jun 91 07:05:20 GMT
References: <1991Jun24.223616.16742@crash.cts.com> <1991Jun25.174944.15705@apollo.hp.com> <1991Jun27.025556.6986@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1991Jun27.141349.10552@apollo.hp.com>
Reply-To: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA
Lines: 49

>In article <1991Jun27.025556.6986@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> tagreen@lothario.ucs.indiana.edu (Todd Green) writes:
>>>This is not meant as a flame, but why do you care?  Anything Apple does
>>>with any RISC (I personally doubt very much whether the RS/6000 architecture
>>>will ever fly in an Apple box) is going to be far, far up the price scale
>>>from C= products.  Ditto '040 boxes from Apple.

>And anyway, we're talking about a CISC box, yes?  I still stand by my
>statement that Apple would have to shove a RISC box to the high end of
>their price scale, to avoid cannabalizing sales of their bread & butter
>Mac II products.  

That's certainly true.  Plus, given that a RISC processor (well, one other
than the five chip IBM America set anyway) isn't inherently THAT much more
expensive than a high end CISC, Apple might get back some of those fat margins
they've had to cut away in trying to be more price competitive in the low end
business.

An interesting point on Apple's approach to IBM occured to me recently.  Ever
since these Apple/IBM rumors started flying, everyone's wondering about Apple's
motivation.  Certainly Microsoft got really, really, rich building the OS for
IBM's PC, but only because of the clones.  So that can't be the whole story.  I
figure it's a round-about way for Apple to protect its OS environment.  
Everyone has seen how antsy Apple gets about other companies running anything
that looks like Mac OS, or even cloning Macs.  The legal restrictions have
proved to be nebulous at best, and there's nothing like the Amiga's LSI chips
in a Mac to prevent cloning or hostile ports to other 680x0 machines.  However,
should Apple build systems based on this America chipset, rather than going to
a freely available CPU like an MC88110 or R4000, no one's going to be able to
clone this new machine, except IBM of course.  And I'm sure Apple figures on
being able to handle that.  All in all, it seems to make more sense when taken
in this light, though of course, they don't likely have a signed deal yet.

I think there may be a bit too much emphasis on the RISC vs. CISC war anyway.
Sure, if you're running stuff that needs a few extra MFLOPS, you might like a
shiny new RISC box on your desk.  But how many of you run mainly-integer stuff?
How about mainly-character, like compilers and text processors?  Our UNIX wiz
Rico has a UNIX text-editing benchmark, which produces numbers in units of 
"mollies" (one molly is about 2/3 MIPS).  Molly was a Sun 2, and does, strangely
enough, one molly.  A PC/XT did 0.27 mollies, while a PC/AT did 1.1.  A Sun 
3/160 did 3.9, an Amiga 3000 did 7.3, with the original NeXT at 7.4.  More
interesting, Mac IIfx did 9.2, while a 32MHz GVP/A2000 did 9.6.  The
DECStation 3100 did 16, the SparcStation 1 did 20, and the SparcStation 1+
did 23.  To top it off, cbmvax (DEC/MIPS R3000) did 27, the RS/6000 did 28, 
the '040 based NeXT did 30, and the DECStation 5000 did 35.  Amiga '040 numbers
will be forthcoming...
-- 
Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests"
   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      PLINK: hazy     BIX: hazy
	"This is my mistake.  Let me make it good." -R.E.M.